In relentless pursuit of freedom.
That’s the average starting salary for Praxis grads.
We have many more participants graduating this year, and even more starting the program. We will have more stories and data to add every month.
Don’t follow your passion. Not because it’s a bad idea, but because most of the time it’s not possible early in your life.
Instead, arrive at your passion(s) by taking the sculptor approach. Chisel away everything that you don’t love. In a sentence:
Don’t do stuff you hate.
Everything else is fair game.
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First there’s the first line
And then comes the second line
Finally, the third
“Call me when it’s actually ready.”
I’ve seen variations of this comment on many posts and articles about cool stuff happening in the world.
While I have no opinion on when or whether another person ought to be impressed by something, it strikes me as a rather odd disposition. All the fun of knowing is knowing before it’s a common fact. How often do we say, “Imagine being there while the automobile was first coming to market!”, or, “Imagine seeing Babe Ruth while he was still creating his legend!”
Celebrating new advances and achievements before they are fully complete is being a part of their making. It’s a rare chance to experience the remarkable in its becoming.
Possibility is at least as exciting as a foregone conclusion. Indulge in it!
I’ve met a lot of bright young people planning on law school or in law school.
I’ve also met a lot of unhappy lawyers.
I suspect lots of these young people will end up unhappy lawyers too, and I’ve got a theory as to why.
Lawyers are often “successful” in terms of external indicators and cultural prestige. They tend to make good money and are held in esteem (lawyer jokes notwithstanding). And, of course, lawyering is a perfect fit for some people. I know some very happy lawyers.
But it seems a large percentage of the profession consists of unhappy people. People who don’t particularly enjoy doing divorce or merger and acquisition paperwork. Many who wish they could escape.
How did they end up there in the first place?
Because the educational conveyor belt doesn’t know what else to do with truth-seekers.
Everyone is motivated by a lot of things. But most of us have one core value that, when push comes to shove, trumps the rest. For some it may be freedom, for others security, adventure, or in the case of many an unhappy lawyer, truth.
Those whose dominant core value is truth are rather relentless. They’re smart. They like to argue, and they tend to argue well. They want to get to the bottom of things. They want to find the right answers. They want correct facts and knowledge of right and wrong. They are willing to examine and explore multiple sides of issues and ideas in the process.
Similar to those whose highest value is independence, they’re comfortable questioning authority. But the freedom-seekers tend to be more willing to disobey or ignore the rewards and punishments of the education system. They might rebel against assignments or good grades. Truth-seekers on the other hand, though happy to question the status quo, are typically comfortable following basic rules and getting good grades as well. They see winning at the grade system as a way of finding whatever truth is to be found there.
Herein lies the problem, and the beginning of their disproportionate and often unfortunate pursuit of careers in law. The school system doesn’t know what else to do with them.
There are few ways to channel their truth-seeking desires in school. There’s little in the way of philosophy, history doesn’t do as much debating as fact-spitting, and even the sciences pre-graduate level don’t really spend time questioning anything fundamental.
What’s left? Debate and forensics. Truth-seekers do well here. They love it. Most high school debaters will tell you it was the absolute highlight of their educational experience. They finally got to question everything, look at all sides of issues, argue without being offensive or reprimanded. And they got to “win”.
Parents and teachers of young truth-seekers are so conditioned with the conveyor belt mindset that they struggle to see beyond an easily identifiable handful of job titles. The work/identity trap is also strong, so whatever junior likes must immediately be mapped onto a business card. A focus on external indicators of success furthers the tendency. The common refrain for young debaters is, “You’re always arguing. You should be a lawyer!” What other possible avenues for all this truth-seeking could there be?
“I get to search for the truth? I get to debate it? I get to make everyone proud of a prestigious career? I get to make good money? Yeah, I guess I do need to go to law school!”
So lots of them do.
And lots of them end up wishing they hadn’t. They find out too late that most lawyer jobs have little to do with truth-seeking. The law itself isn’t primarily about truth, and most law jobs are even less so. They’re about navigating bureaucracy and nearly impenetrable wordplay to help people do very simple tasks like buy and sell things, move money, end or begin professional or personal relationships, or draft up “just in case” language. It’s a fundamentally conservative endeavor, concerned with protection from liability more than the caution-to-the-wind pursuit of truth that landed them there.
Law requires attention to detail, a high degree of literacy, and plenty of patience and problem solving. Those things are perfect for some people. But those whose core value is truth aren’t often among them.
Because their desire for truth was so quickly tracked and careerified, they never had the chance to explore. Law school is particularly problematic then, because of its astronomical price tag. Upon completion, more doors have been closed than opened. There are only so many jobs that pay enough to service the debt. And by now they’re closer to marriage, kids, and other financial obligations that make lower starting pay gigs tougher. After law school, they kind of feel like they have to be a lawyer, even if it doesn’t scratch the itch for truth.
A decade later and the debt burden might be gone, but the golden handcuffs replace it. Quality of life seems locked in. Mortgages, cars, schools, and prestige can’t easily be downgraded, even if they are unhappy most of the day most days. It’s lifestyle slavery, and it kind of sucks.
Where else might these truth-seekers have gone with their passion? Perhaps philosophy. Not just in the academic sense, which often comes with its own bureaucracy and BS, but more generally. It’s true, you can be a philosopher and a lawyer or a philosopher and a great many other things. Your source of income and who you are need not be the same. Seeking, writing, researching, fact-finding, and questioning are such general and generally valuable traits that a true philosopher can apply them in myriad careers. But law is a career that makes being defined by anything else particularly hard.
How many authors, podcasters, coaches, mentors, counselors, investigative reporters, or entrepreneurs are at bottom truth-seekers? Truth as a core value is applicable in a great many areas. Most of all, someone with the freedom to follow their passion for truth is likely to discover or create a career we can’t even yet imagine. Sadly, the school conveyor belt tends to corral more than its fair share into law.
So here’s the takeaway: Stop telling good arguers to become lawyers.
Let them explore the world fully and freely. Let them try a lot of stuff. Let them follow their questions. If after real exposure to the day to day reality a career in law appeals to them, great. They’ll choose law school. But don’t obsess about placing them on a list of predefined career categories and channeling their core values into it before they know what’s what.
I’m a parent. I get it. We worry how our kids will feed themselves and build a life. If they love something, our mind immediately tries to formalize and monetize it. My son loves video games and comics and superheroes, and more than once I’ve begun formulating ways to turn this interest into a career as a video game designer or illustrator and set him on that path now.
Fight that urge. Open the world up to them, not just the few aspects of it that come with a title and salary today. But everything that it is and could be tomorrow.
This leads to another good question…what are some other career tracks that young people with other core values get placed on too early?…
We talk a lot at Praxis about building a better signal than generic degrees and institutional imprimaturs. Whether or not you have a degree, you need to learn to 1) create value and, 2) signal your ability to create value to the world. Degrees are a very weak way to achieve either. You need something more.
I got an email today from a guy who decided to put that advice into practice. Check out what Daniel Myers had to say:
Hey Isaac,
You know how Praxis always talks about creating value? About taking the entrepreneurial route in your work? Well, I decided to do just that, by writing a 44-page report on business and entrepreneurship for a venture capitalist firm here in TN. I had read an article this past Fall on the Praxis website about value creation for a company instead of just shooting a CV/Resume out to everyone and expecting it to do all the work. This report has been well received by the public and has truly allowed me to create a name for myself, rather than just being another undergrad with “some resume”.
All this said, I want to thank all of you at Praxis for what you do. I am continually inspired by all of you at Praxis and hope you all continue to be successful in all your endeavors. Again, thank you for your inspiration!
Best, Daniel
P.S. I’m reading Derek’s book on “How to Get Any Job You Want“. It aligns perfectly with what I did and will continue to do in my career.
Here’s a link to Daniel’s report on startups in TN.
I don’t know how long it took for Daniel to put together such an in-depth report. But compared to what? How does time spent creating a valuable resource like that compare to time spent sitting in a classroom, blasting out generic resumes, or waiting and hoping for a cool opportunity?
Daniel gained not only a great signal of his value creating potential, but a lot of knowledge, skill, confidence, and even some free PR along the way. In short, by creating value now instead of waiting to be invited to with a formal job offer, Daniel became more of who he wants to be, instead of waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
Go start building now. What are you waiting for? And of course, if you need some help, a great apprenticeship with an entrepreneur, and an intense year-long experience in value creation, discover Praxis.
Kevin Geary believes that both praise and punishment are crippling kids. The host of Revolutionary Parent Radio joins me to discuss how he arrived at his unconventional approach to parenting and teaching and what it looks like in practice. The idea that kids can, will, and want to reason and be treated like actual autonomous humans deserving of respect and honesty isn’t so radical on its face, but it’s so rare in practice it’s come to be viewed as radical. Kevin walks through some of the critiques and responses in this awesome, engaging episode.
Kevin is an entrepreneur who runs Rebootedbody.com and also has a site dedicated to lighting techniques for photography, Learningtolight.com.
This and all episodes are also available on SoundCloud, iTunes, YouTube, and Stitcher.
A rude look and shout
A process without logic
Touched by TSA
The standard theory behind support for creating a legal monopoly for certain ideas, processes, and inventions is that absent such promise of monopoly there would be far less innovation.
It has a surface level logic to it. People respond to incentives. Legal monopoly means more money for the one who has it. People tend to like the money incentive. Therefore, more people will innovate because they have the incentive to capture greater rewards by securing a monopoly on the production or sale of their invention.
The weird thing is it doesn’t play out like this in the real world. Something is missing.
Inventions typically spring from technicians and masters at a craft. These are the types who are driven by a passion for what they do. They want to solve problems, discover things, build things, and create things. So they do. If they seek a legal monopoly on their invention this happens after the fact. It is hard to imagine many innovators saying, “Oh wow! Think of possibility of solving this chemistry problem and discovering an entirely new way to do X! Wait…get a lawyer in the lab before I go any further. I refuse to make any discoveries without proof that I’ll be protected from competition once I do.”
And innovation doesn’t look like that. You can see this by observing areas without the ability to get legal monopolies on their inventions. Fashion, food, and football are a few of my favorites. You can copy, borrow, and imitate fashion designs, recipes, and defensive schemes with abandon. Many people do. Yet each of these fields is as dynamic as any industry, constantly evolving and introducing new things. Apparently the innovative offensive coordinator, cook, and designer don’t require the promise of monopoly to entice them to innovate.
People do respond to incentives. This is a fact of life and one that need not be overturned to overturn the belief that IP laws are required for innovation. Any good economist will tell you that incentives are many, and value is subjective. The innovators are certainly responsive to money incentives, but 1) legal monopoly is not the only or best way to earn money for inventions and, 2) money isn’t the only incentive driving invention.
As for number one, consider how many people are typically working on a similar innovation simultaneously. With the current IP regime, only one can get the monopoly. If we want to take incentives seriously, what kind of incentive does this create for all the others? Furthermore, the one most likely to get the monopoly is the one with all the lawyers and accountants and resources and willingness to take others to court, not the one with the greatest contribution to the discovery. This would seem to drive upstart innovators away from the task for fear of being sued by the big guys as much or more than it would drive them to innovate for the possible promise of securing a patent.
As for number two, while the promise of monopoly may be the dominant incentive for lawyers and R&D departments, it’s not the dominant incentive for inventors. They innovate first, driven by a passion for the task, the desire to solve a problem, create their dream, help a colleague, or improve their own daily life with some small innovation. Yes, they want and seek money for the invention once successful, but the absence of a promise of monopoly does not stop them from creating.
Understanding incentives is crucial to really understanding how the world works and how to change it. But an elementary look at incentives that examines only dollars and cents and only their intended, not actual, beneficiaries will not get you very far.
For more on the problems with intellectual property laws, check out “Against Intellectual Monopoly“. It’s excellent.
I joined the wonderful World Wanderers Podcast (hosted by Amanda Kingsmith and Praxis participant Ryan Ferguson!) to talk about our family trip to Ecuador.
I haven’t listened to the episode yet, but we recorded it less than a week after we got back from the trip and I remember wondering if I’d even been able to process the experience enough to talk about it sensibly. I did talk about it (a lot…I think I probably rambled at length…sorry!) and give a sort of quick take on the good, bad, and ugly and some lessons learned. Still, I’m sure as time goes on we’ll form more ideas about our experience.
It was really awesome and also really hard. It didn’t go to plan, but I wouldn’t trade it. A great adventure I don’t think any of us will forget!
Anyway, take a listen to the episode if you’re interested in hearing one person’s take on international travel with kids. Oh, and listen to other episodes of WWP. It’s a great show!
*This workshop is not primarily about tips and techniques (though they are offered). It’s about you giving a speech and getting individualized feedback and ways to improve.
We’ve been doing a public speaking workshop for Praxis participants for a few years, and now for the first time I’m opening it up to the public. It’s a process I learned from an amazing public speaking coach years ago when I was running a summer fellowship program at IHS.
I’ll only be accepting 10 people in this course since it demands individual time and attention for each participant to watch your speeches and provide feedback.
The course is $149, as cheap as I could get it considering the time required.
The layout is pretty straightforward. There are a series of ten short videos with tips and best practices for your preparation, props, eyes, mouth, hands, feet, and a few final odds and ends.
After watching the videos you’ll record yourself giving a 3-minute speech in front of at least one other person, submit it between May 1-3, I’ll respond with feedback within 24 hours, and you’ll do a second take and submit between May 4-6, and again I’ll deliver final feedback within 24 hours.
The course videos can be watched anytime, as many times as you like, but submissions will only be taken and feedback provided between May 1-7.
This is a pretty awesome workshop I’ve been through myself, and I think you’ll find it valuable. This open online version is new, and I’m excited to see how it goes!
Nothing better to do.
The only things that matter when it comes to succeeding in the marketplace are:
It’s not your school, your grades, your network, your knowledge or anything else you may have been told. Those things are only useful insofar as they help you do #1 or #2.
This should be an empowering revelation. Value creation opportunities abound. Yet it often makes young people feel intimidated. After years in classrooms acquiring few real-world skills and gaining knowledge that is basically an inferior version of what experts possess, how are they supposed to create value for anyone?
Here’s where the secret weapon comes in.
Value creation is not about having an absolute advantage over others at some activity. It’s about having a comparative advantage. This concept, popularized by David Ricardo a few hundred years ago, is a powerful tool to understand and seize opportunity as a young person. It reveals the secret weapon called ‘nothing better to do.’
To have a comparative advantage at something simply requires that your opportunity cost is lower than others. What you have to give up to engage in that activity is less valuable than what they have to give up.
Young people with few skills and little experience don’t have a lot of high value options for how to use their time, so their opportunity cost tends to be very low. This makes their value creation potential high.
How does it work?
Imagine a CEO who is incredibly organized, detail-oriented, and something of a wizard at scheduling, logistics, travel planning, and utilizing all the best productivity apps and tools. She’s many times better at this than an aspiring 18-year-old. Yet for every hour she spends planning her travel and meetings, she gives up the ability to spend that hour selling a new client or planning the marketing expansion. Those are high-value activities, say with the potential to bring in another $30,000 in revenue. How much is excellent travel planning worth? Something, but less than that. Her opportunity cost is very high.
That 18-year-old, on the other hand, has nothing better to do. Even if it took him three hours to do the travel planning she could do in one, he would be giving up a lot less. He could no longer browse Facebook, read a textbook, watch Netflix, or play basketball. There is nothing bad about those activities, but none of them likely have the potential to create $30,000 worth of value for him.
If our 18-year-old realizes this, he has a powerful weapon. He can offer to take over scheduling for the CEO and free her up to do more valuable work. She might be reticent because it’s possible that he could actually create more work if he’s really bad. To reduce risk further, he can go all in and offer to do it for free and demonstrate his ability by planning one mock trip to show her.
This requires no special skills, just a touch of creativity, persistence, and Googling. Yet if he lands the gig, even unpaid, he will be exposed to the world of a CEO and probably learn more in a month than he could in a year sitting in classrooms. He can observe the company and identify other areas to create value – other areas where his opportunity cost is lower than others – and potentiall parlay this into a really cool role there or at another company. Maybe he can even learn how to start his own.
So few young people try anything like this. They’re stuck spending endless hours and countless dollars getting a piece of paper that makes them identical to every other young person. They accumulate debt and expectations that make them feel the need to enter the professional world at a level of pay that, frankly, they can’t yet justify with their limited skill and experience. They feel it would be beneath them, after getting an expensive degree, to work for free or low pay to get a foot in the door. They are completely nuetralizing their greatest asset, their low opportunity cost.
If you’re young and have little in the way of monthly expenses or valuable opportunities in front of you, rejoice. This means you can explore and test and try a great many things. Your ability to create value is tremendous if you look for places where others have a high opportunity cost and you do not.
Get off the conveyor belt. Break the mold. Go do some cool stuff.
If you want a paid apprenticeship with an amazing entrepreneur + rigorous personal and professional development and coaching, check out discoverpraxis.com.
Some questions have accumulated and it’s time for an Ask Isaac episode! I really enjoy doing these because there’s no logistical stress with a guest, no prep work, and I get to talk directly to listeners, which feels kind of intimate (as weird as that sounds since I’m just talking into a mic in a room by myself). Plus, the questions are always fun and I like wrestling with them verbally.
*If you love the show (or even can mildly tolerate it), please review it on iTunes!*
As you may know, I recently spent a couple of weeks in Ecuador with my family and there were a couple of questions regarding that adventure. I was interviewed in depth about the trip on the (excellent) World Wanderers Podcast. The episode should be live soon.
Other questions that were answered here:
(NOTE: For some reason, the sound is a little tinny on this episode. It seems like my mic settings were a bit off. Sorry! Just pretend it’s more “authentic” that way, like a scratchy vinyl record.)
Send me questions anytime about anything. I love to get them and will respond!
Sponsor Spot: If you want to spend a year apprenticing with an entrepreneur and building your own brand, skills, experience, confidence, network, and knowledge, apply to Praxis today. The program cost nets out to $0. What you earn equals what you pay. Zero debt, zero BS, zero wasting away killing time. One year will change your life.
This and all episodes are also available on SoundCloud, iTunes, YouTube, and Stitcher.